Tag: startups

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Why I Still Have Faith in Hacker News

If you browse Hacker News enough you’ll start to see article trends.

  • Startup X is Startup Y for Dogs
  • Why you should use framework Z over formerly hot framework B
  • Cool Javascript demo is N lines of code
  • How I failed at A and it made me better at B.

Don’t get me wrong, some of this stuff is interesting, but most of it is just noise to me. The reason I come to HN is for the comments. Thats where the good stuff is. HN is one of the brightest internet communities I’ve ever had the pleasure to interact with. For instance, today I posted to HN asking for the community to review my startup Smooth Bulletin. Within an hour I had two very thoughtful comments about business and market ideas that I hadn’t even thought of. I expect I’ll probably get even more feedback as the day goes on, and that I’ll benefit from those just as much as the first comments.

Thats why I still have faith in Hacker News. Not because of the content, but because of the people. The people there are incredibly smart and willing to give their advice just so that maybe you can succeed one day. I’ve been a member of HN for several years now and this hasn’t changed at all since the time I joined, and I hope that it never does.

And yes, I posted this to Hacker news, so maybe I should add “Why I still have faith in X” to the list.

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28 Questions

Over the past few years I’ve tried my hand at launching a couple of different start ups. Over this time period, I’ve collected a set of questions from many different sources (HN, YCombinator, TechStars, etc) that I ask myself before proceeding. They help be decided if this is a real or manufactured problem, if it can be profitable, and if people will buy what I’m selling. My latest project idea is the only idea I’ve had that passes all of these questions to my satisfaction. How do yours hold up?

  1. What are you going to build?
  2. What is the actual problem?
  3. How will you sell your product/service?
  4. What are some potential obstacles?
  5. What are some existing options that solve this problem? How are you different?
  6. Who needs what you’re making?
  7. How do you know that they need it?
  8. How is the problem being solved now? Is it being solved now?
  9. Why isn’t this being done your way already?
  10. How will customers find out about you?
  11. What resistance will they have to trying your product?
  12. What are some key things about your project that outsiders don’t understand?
  13. Who will your first paying customer be?
  14. How might you expand if your initial idea succeeds?
  15. Why did you choose to work on this idea?
  16. Six months from now, what will be you biggest problem?
  17. What are the hard parts of this idea?
  18. Who would you hire/add to your team?
  19. What is the next step in product evolution?
  20. How does your product work?
  21. How big is the opportunity? [market]
  22. How do you know customers need what you’re making?
  23. What domain expertise do you have? Why should you be the one to do this?
  24. What part of your project will you build first? (could be business connections, hardware, software, etc)
  25. How much money could you make per year?
  26. How will you make money?
  27. What have you built in the past?
  28. How would you spend $5,000, how would you use it?